Family Classics For Teens

The Gambler brilliantly captures the strangely powerful compulsion to bet that Dostoevsky, himself a compulsive gambler, knew so well. The hero rides an emotional roller coaster between exhilaration and despair, and secondary characters such as the grandmother, who throws much of her fortune away at the gaming tables, are unforgettable.

This is the classic story of a boy's adventures growing up in a small town on the banks of the Mississippi river over a hundred years ago. The cheerful, adventurous hero plays truant to form a pirate band and, together with his best friend, Huckleberry Finn, finds fun and excitement, and buried treasure, along the shores of the great river.

Mark Twain's lively tale of the scrapes and adventures of boyhood is set in Missouri, where Tom Sawyer and his friend Huckleberry Finn have the kinds of adventures many boys can only imagine - along with trying to impress girls, especially Becky Thatcher; fights and stunts in the schoolyard; getting lost (and saved) in a cave; and playing on the Mississippi River.

Harry Gruber plays the role of Scrooge in his school's production of A Christmas Carol, and he is extra nervous about tonight's performance because his father is in the audience - not away for business, as usual. Will the story's message of Christmas cheer and the redemptive power of love reach his father's distracted Scrooge heart?

Caje Amis and his father are mountain folk, they live off the land and have few interactions with more sophisticated people. But at the onset of an especially harsh winter, the two take shelter with distant relatives. The adjustment to their new life is an easy one for Caje, but impossible for his father, and the elder Amis ends up abandoning his son and vanishing into the cold!

In the early years of our country, a poor school teacher, Justin Morgan, receives a horse and her tiny colt in payment for some work. He wishes he had been given money instead. Hoping that he might sell both horses for a fair price, he asks his student, Joel, to break in the colt. To his surprise, young Joel soon discovers that this small, brown creature has special abilities: "Bub" can pull more than a team of oxen, and he can run faster than a racehorse.

A Christmas Carol is undoubtedly the most famous supernatural story in English. However, it was not the only supernatural story of the season that Charles Dickens wrote. In Victorian England, Christmas was the time to explore the supernatural in stories, and Charles Dickens was one of the best at it. Included in this volume are a full-cast dramatization of A Christmas Carol, plus three more of Dickens' best stories of the season.

Jacob Ericson, a shy, enigmatic, and somewhat inept ranch hand learns that his hands possess the mysterious gift of healing: a gift he uses to cure animals and Sharon, the woman he adores. His gift is quickly exploited and the boundaries of his charm and naïveté begin to stretch. Following Sharon to Los Angeles, Jacob offers his healing powers for free at a church in Los Angeles, and then at a seedy stage show where his beloved Sharon also works.

Rinconete y Cortadillo es, seguramente, la mas popular de todas las Novelas ejemplares de Cervantes. En la andadura de estos dos muchachos desde la famosa Venta del Molinillo hasta el horrendo patio de Monipodio en Sevilla, Cervantes ha desplegado, con humor y sin renunciar a su fina ironía, una vision crítica y satirica de ciertos ambientes sociales en la Espana de la segunda mitad del siglo XVI.

Cervantes nos cuenta la vida de dos jóvenes muchachos los cuales se encuentran en el camino de Toledo con dirección Andalucía y hacen amistad uno con otro. Ambos muchachos llamados Pedro del Rincón y Diego Cortado, huyeron de sus respectivos hogares debido a que eran maltratados por sus familias. Por el camino hacia Sevilla encuentran a un arriero, a éste le estafan con cartas robándole todo el dinero que llevaba consigo.

'Twas the night before Christmas. Ebenezer Scrooge was alone, when suddenly he heard a ghostly moan. A ghost it was, took him back to the past, then to the present and future days in hope that Scrooge would mend his ways.

Life on the streets of turn-of-the-century London hurls the orphan Oliver Twist into a danger-filled adventure! With him we meet the Artful Dodger and Fagin, and learn the ways of the hard world...

In klarer Sprache wird die flotte Handlung der Geschichten von Gulliver bei den Lilliputanern und bei den Riesen geschildert. Er versucht, gut mit ihnen auszukommen, lernt ihre Sprache und es entwickeln sich Freundschaften - aber manche Adelige und Militärs werden zu Feinden. So lebt er in ständiger Gefahr. Wie wird es ihm ergehen?

Am Ufer des Mississippi liegt das beschauliche Städtchen, in dem Huck leben muss - alles ist ihm langweilig und zu ordentlich. Kaum zu glauben: Sein Vater versucht ihm zu verbieten, in die Schule zu gehen! Und so dauert es nicht lange, bis er unter abenteuerlichen Umständen fliehen muss. Er - als weißer Außenseiter - und Jim, ein schwarzer Sklave, tun sich zusammen, in einer Zeit, in der Rassismus und Sklaverei fest verwurzelt waren.

Vielfältige Charaktere sind in diesem Klassiker in einem Spiel auf Leben und Tod verbunden. Nie geht die Spannung verloren, die Reise mit dem Schiff ist für Jim Hawkins eine Möglichkeit, hinaus in die Welt zu gehen und sich zu bewähren. Er ordnet sich nicht unter und geht immer wieder eigene Wege. Es wird auch gezeigt, wie die Gier nach Gold und Geld manche Menschen zu Übeltätern und Bestien macht. Es wird auch klar, wie manche Menschen am Alkohol scheitern - selbst der Lange John Silver, der Anführer der Piraten, warnt seine Kumpane vergeblich davor

Chris Brabson hates the Union troops. Yankee riders in the Tennessee mountains have stolen his family's newly harvested crops and their only horse. In spite of this, Chris' brother joins the Union army, and his parents refuse to take either side. But Chris has no doubts, he would fight for the Confederacy. The Perilous Road, a Newbery Honor book, powerfully illustrates the senseless waste of war and the true meaning of courage and tolerance.

Uno de los mas amados personajes de toda la literatura infantil es Peter Pan, el nino que no queria crecer y que hacia realidad todas las aventuras con que los ninos de todas las edades suenan.

New Mark Twain! This previously unpublished Twain piece was written 125 years ago, composed in 1876 as a "blind novelette" that Twain planned to launch as a competition for other great writers of the day. The competition never took place, and the story was thought by many to have been lost. This rediscovered gem, with a new introduction and afterword by Roy Blount, Jr., and brilliantly read by Blount and Garrison Keillor, allows us, once again, to celebrate the literary genius of Mark Twain.

"Local color" author Frances Gilchrist Wood wrote this powerful tale of a young wife who proves better able to succeed on the homestead frontier than does her husband.

Here is one of London's famous stories of the Klondike, where men had to battle the elements, and often each other, to survive.